francescafiorentini-blog

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The world’s 99 percent are on the move. Though myriad, these movements coalesce around the notion of defending a dream: a dream of justice in Florida, of democracy in Egypt, freedom in Guantanamo, of honor instead of prison for Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and all whistleblowers. A dream of workers' rights in Detroit, human rights for the undocumented, and that Black Lives Matter everywhere.

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It has been 10 years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that by now most know was a war for oil. Though difficult to look back on this decade, it is the ease at which we forget that condems suffering veterans to the shadows, Iraqis to a country in shambles, and leaves the American people vulnerable to future seductions of war-making.

I remember everything so well: where I was when bombs began to rain down on Baghdad and that paralyzing chill of death and shame. I remember the acute feeling of impotence at our inability to stop what many call "the war machine".

Months of organizing, demonstrating, staging sit-ins and direct actions, and even after the biggest global protest against war the result was the same: a bunch of oil-hungry neoconservatives, armed with nothing but racist rhetoric and lies, were dragging the country to war.

It was a feeling that the world no longer belonged to its people; that no one-- no politician and no major media outlet--had even a sliver of our interests at heart nor a shred of accountability. And it's worth noting how difficult it has been to regain any sense of trust in either after a deception so great. 

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Usually, you would expect middle-aged politicians, President Obama, for instance, to oppose, or at least ignore, proposals to get marijuana legalized, right?

Well, that's no longer the case in tiny Uruguay, where many parliamentarians are aggressively pushing for a law that will get pot fully legalized at the national level.

Lawmakers in Uruguay are insisting that this law should be passed, in spite of a recent poll that suggested that most of the country's citizens are against the legalization of the plant. The politicians say they support legalization because it's the best way to fight addiction and drug-related crime.

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November 2, 2012 Buenos Aires

I wasn’t sure I’d have time to write this before Tuesday. But a recent scare ad put out by the Romney campaign featuring Hugo Chavez saying that if he were American he would vote Obama (and vice versa) has lit the fire under my fingertips.

Before the Romney campaign decided to use Chavez’s quote to once again mislabel Obama a socialist, I was struck by the Venezuelan president’s words. As a journalist and a radical who believes that the elite two-party political system in the United States needs a revolutionary makeover, I find voting Democrat a tough pill to swallow. But after four years living outside of the U.S. and witnessing and writing on the effects of U.S. economic and military intervention in the region, it is clear that the difference between a lesser of two evils while minimal, is vital. So vital that an actualsocialist president, who has implemented bold social programs to lift many Venezuelans out of poverty and has put the country’s oil profits back into public hands, says that he himself would vote Democrat.

The truth is if Latin American had a vote in the U.S. elections, it would be for the Democrats. While Obama’s stance toward Latin America has been far from progressive – recognizing coup governments of Honduras and Paraguay; signing free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Peru; and dragging feet on immigration reform – it is the "diet" imperialism to that of the neoconservative-led GOP.

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With protests at U.S. embassies across the Arab and Muslim world, it’s high time to stop playing dumb and start changing policy

“Fool me once, shame on… (pause) …shame on you …(longer pause)…it fool me can’t get fooled again.”                                                           -George W. Bush, 2002

It is a classic line from Bush Jr.’s presidency. Hilarious and painfully ironic for both the lesson it holds and the masterful way it was bumbled. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” A simple saying that when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Washington has epitomized with astounding pigheadedness.

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Soccer's Second Sex

In a region where soccer is life, Latin America’s female players still work in the shadows of their male counterparts. Nowhere is the gender gap clearer than in Argentina, a country known for its all-star national team and for producing world-famous soccer players such as Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi. Here the national women’s team works both for victories and for recognition within a culture of sexism that makes no room for women in soccer. Whereas male players receive million-dollar club contracts and are looked after by agents and trainers, female players are unpaid and have only their families to rely on for support.  

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July 4, 2012, Buenos Aires

It has been nearly two weeks since the parliament of Paraguay orchestrated an institutional coup that removed President Fernando Lugo from power and installed vice president Fernando Franco in his place, a mere 9 months before the next presidential elections.

Reading articles coming out of South America, I have been trying to wrap my head around not just what happened in Paraguay but what it could mean for the region. And 

I’m afraid it’s not good. When one connects the dots – many of which require further investigation–it suddenly feels as though the gains that countries in the region have made toward multi-lateral cooperation in order to guarantee economic and political sovereignty and are dangerously vulnerable.

I have always been skeptical of claims by Hugo Chavez or even anti-militarist voices here in the region that believe that the U.S. has not let go of its plans for the region in its fulfillment of “Full Spectrum Dominance”—controlling natural resources indirectly through elite puppet governments and directly through the threat of military force. Between the U.S’ refocus on the Middle East and the rise of left-leaning governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay, the idea of the region falling victim to the kinds of imperial/neoliberal bullying of the 70s, 80s, and 90s seemed both politically overblown and strategically unfeasible.

I am no longer so sure.

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What is to be done when capital and government abandon the people? It is a question that social movements throughout Europe and the US have begun to raise with a creative political militancy unseen in decades. These are movements characterised by their openness, breadth and, most importantly, their fundamental critique of an economic model that doesn’t serve the world’s majority. But in the face of repression and austerity measures, the question has become not only how to keep such issues on the table but how to make political change and gain ground.  To better understand this moment, we can turn to these movements’ South American predecessor: Argentina 2001, when popular protest put an end to destructive neoliberal policies and drastically changed the political terrain. 

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This Spring, it’s on. Outpourings like the 99% Spring, May Day actions throughout the country, ongoing Occupy projects, and the work against the NATO summit later this month, mean the movement for economic justice and real democracy in the U.S. can't be pepper-sprayed away.

But as attention moves to critical domestic issues, the repression of the Arab Spring and wars of occupation rage on with much too little public debate. Which is how Washington prefers things. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Because despite the collected face of the military wizard, you might see that the men at the controls haven’t a clue. Yet if we are to understand where our tax dollars really went in April, why the country is supposedly broke ­ and why after a decade of “war on terrorism” the world is less safe than ever, we must pull back the curtain on a military policy that teeters between terrible and disastrous.

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“Two bald men fighting over a comb,” said Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges of the war between the U.K. and Argentina over the Malvinas Islands. It’s a metaphor that became branded to what many believe to have been a senseless war between two deeply unpopular governments looking to win points at home, over a cluster of islands in the remote South Atlantic. Thatcher’s popularity was plummeting thanks to a series of neoliberal domestic policies, and with 30,000 disappearances to its name the Argentine military junta and its iron-fisted rule was losing any legitimacy it once had.

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“We were capable, We are capable.” The slogan has repeated itself on government radio and television adverts throughout Argentina, which is celebrating 200 years since the May 25th revolution that eventually led to the country’s independence on July 9, 1816. The natural question such a slogan begs, “of what exactly?” One assumes its independence from Spain. Yet two centuries later, though nobody’s colony, many are still asking: How independent is Argentina really?

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"This is a historic day. One we will remember for the rest of our lives. But we should never forget that to get here, many comrades gave their lives."

  Lohana Berkins’ voice sailed over the victorious cheers of hundreds of transgender activists and supporters, and reverberated against the Argentine Congress building in downtown Buenos Aires on Wednesday evening. Inside, Congress had just voted to pass the Gender Identity Law that would allow Argentines to change their name and sex on their identifications without the ruling of a judge, approval from a psychiatrist, nor any obligatory surgery. “And today,” said Berkins, the president of Association for the Fight for Transvestite Identity (ATTI), “those who call us lowlifes, dirty, depraved, infected, thieves, for those who want to permanently hide us away, we tell them, we are first-class citizens!” 

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“El pobre tiene que volar. Ya no hay más campo. Todo country, todo country.” (The poor man has to disappear. There is no more countryside. It’s all private neighbourhoods. All private neighbourhoods.)

They are the words of Sara Espinosa, 94, who lives in Punta Canal in the town of Tigre, just metres away from the waters of Canal Villanueva. Though she has lived here for more than half a century, in the past few years Espinosa has found herself increasingly isolated from the world beyond her home thanks to fences and a wall of mud built around it by real estate giant EIDICO (Common Interest Real Estate Undertakings). The company has purchased the area and is currently constructing two gated communities on either side. While most of her neighbours have sold their land and moved away, Espinosa remains, perhaps unaware of the profit to be made off the land where her humble home stands.

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“This country is in a psychotic structure,” says an exasperated clinical psychiatrist living and working in Buenos Aires. He shares many Argentines’ dismay at the government’s new restrictions on the buying and selling of dollars.

As of last October, all Argentines who wish to purchase foreign currency must gain approval of the transaction from the Federal Administration of Public Income (AFIP) by showing proof of legal income and specifying the money’s destination. And starting on May 23, those Argentines who wish to exchange pesos in order to travel abroad must complete a detailed online form specifying their travel destination and dates, current employment, and the amount of money they wish to exchange.

These are measures the government says are to prevent money laundering and capital flight, particularly targeting businesses and financiers. Dogs trained to smell the ink of large quantities of foreign currency accompany inspectors at the country’s borders to prevent the physical attempt of cash escaping the country. The result in the past six months has been much confusion as even the smallest of transactions have been denied, and caused the value of the dollar on the black market to jump 27% above the legal exchange rate. 

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It always seemed like an absurd exercise to recount where one was on 9/11. Some way to personalize the moment or get closer to the action. Maybe it’s just a way to make something that has been so filtered and retold, so shadowy yet simultaneously sensationalized, feel real. Sadly, the task of remembering is difficult without images of some patriotic red, white, and blue CNN graphic coming to mind. We have been told how to feel about the event (and those that followed) for so long, we rarely get a moment to do so. I choose to remember the day, and the horrors that have happened since, with this brief recollection of the moment that I became an adult.

Ten years ago today I was turning 18. It was September 10, 2001, and my friend had gotten me a mint chocolate chip ice cream cake to celebrate. Covered in balloons made of icing, it was a delicious throwback to childhood; perhaps an ironic way to honor its passing.  We ate most of it in our dorm room and smushed what was left between our fingers and into each other’s faces. I went to sleep that night in the first home away from home I had ever had: a dorm room on Washington Square Park. It was my first month of college at NYU.